Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This week we're looking at how much food we'll need to produce to feed the world's population over the next 40 years.
Listener Rob Ryan-Silver from Maryland in the U.S.
Let's look back to 10,000 years ago, the dawn of agriculture, when the human diet progressed from just a handful of nuts and berries to bread, pasta, cornflakes.
I don't think they had cornflakes, Ruth.
Right, so Megan Clark calculated that we'd have to produce as much food in the next 50 years as we did in the past 500.
Ah, well, that's a statistic we've looked into before ourselves, isn't it?
It's not true.
Actually, the dead currently outnumber the living by 15 to 1.
And this grand statistical claim that people are making, it can't be an easy thing to work out.
We don't know for certain how many people were on Earth 500 years ago, really.
We only have accurate population data from around 1800 onwards.
I mean, the UK census was first taken in 1801, for example.
And we don't know how many calories people were consuming.
So the more food available, the more we'll eat.
I suppose it's a bit like having a packet of biscuits in the cupboard.
If they're there, you'll want them and eat them.
So Joseph's saying the amount of meat being eaten across the world is increasing and that that means we need to produce more feed for the animals that get used for meat.
Ah, well, thinking back to the claim in The Economist, it was said that in the next 40 years humans will need to produce more food than they did in the previous 10,000.
And that's based on the idea that countries will get richer and so people will consume more and that there'll be more people living on the planet in 2050 too, about 9 billion of us in fact.
So to sum up, the economists made it sound like there was a drastic challenge ahead.
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